501 Places

It’s not unusual in an English bed and breakfast to wake up to the smell of frying bacon. Whether you’re staying away from home on business or pleasure and whatever the day holds in store for you, there are few better ways to kick off proceedings than with a no-holds barred full English breakfast. Yet [...]

We were in Budapest for barely 48 hours, yet on four occasions we watched in despair as a bus pulled away in front of us and left us waiting in the cold. Every connection was missed by a whisker, each time we stood and stared as our bus disappeared into the December gloom. It’s not [...]

Let’s face it: for most of us a five star hotel is an elusive treat. With travel budgets becoming increasingly tight most people would pay less for a week’s worth of accommodation than some of the most exclusive places charge for a night. But just because staying a night in a top hotel may be [...]

Travelling to faraway places will always provide us with exhilarating moments. These are the ones that we use to make our friends and family green with envy on our return home. But a trip of any reasonable length will rarely pass without those times when our happy disposition has a day off (or at the very [...]

Today I completed an email interview for another site. One of the questions required me to give a piece of advice to new inexperienced travellers. Instinctively I wrote that we shouldn’t be shy in talking to strangers; the encounters that result will almost always provide us with our most cherished travel memories. I absolutely believe [...]

Anyone can take part. We can indulge in any public place wherever we are in the world. Best of all it’s free to do it. I challenge anyone to deny that they enjoy sometimes just sitting back and watching people go about their daily lives. People watching is of course a very easy thing to [...]

If you spend any time reading all these fancy travel blogs you’d be forgiven for thinking that travelling is one big holiday. Seeing new places, meeting new people, sampling the food and drink of the world and watching the most glorious sunsets day after day on a string of exotic beaches: surely it can’t get [...]

Most of my travel memories are very happy ones. I’ve seen things at first hand that I’d long dreamed of since learning about them in childhood books, I’ve had unexpected encounters with people who have left their mark long after I’ve returned home and I’ve been fortunate to have travelled far and wide without any [...]

I’d had a bad day. And to top it off, here I was in a pastel pink Parisian hotel room, complete with a frilly lamp and that textured wallpaper that a previous generation had considered the height of interior design chic. There was no TV and no view from the dirty window. I was only [...]